We are off to a good start for our February epistolary writing! I am grateful to David Horowitz for writing a piece for us to post this week. I also tried my hand at writing in this form and am posting my letter as well. I hope to hear from more of you.

Here again is the writing topic I chose for this month’s epistolary writing idea, spurred on after I read Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory, a collection of epistolary essays. One she writes to a poetry workshop teacher whose advice, support, and encouragement she hadn’t allowed herself to follow years ago, the encouragement she was finally able to use to read poets the teacher had listed for her so many years ago.

Chang’s words got me thinking about the variety of people who try to help us along our journey to use our gifts, but for various reasons, we don’t listen to them. This month I would love to post letters you write to one such a person telling them what you remember of what they offered and going on to admit why you didn’t follow their support and how you finally began to or could decide to right now.

Look up the Kindle version of Dear Memory to read a sample of Chang’s letters. Write one of your own and send it me. I will post your letters all during February. Keep them coming. I post late Thursday nights, so if I hear from you before next Thursday I can post your writing!

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To My Conscience by David Horowitz

To My Conscience:

You were right! You warned and urged me: when I buy a new padlock with two keys, detach the second key from the little metal keychain loop; then, place it in a drawer, safely out of the way but not hard to find. That way, if I lose one of the keys, I’ll have a spare.

I half-listened, though, ultimately tuning out your warning. I’ll do it in a few days, I thought. And, sure enough, within two days I lost both keys! Now, I have to pay the folks who manage the storage locker facility a $25 fee to saw off my new padlock, and then I will have to pay $10 for an even newer padlock. Lesson learned.

Yet, I was also reminded I am far from alone. The day after I lost my padlock keys, I noticed near a shopping mall a glitter in a gutter: a corroded metal key on a key chain. It looked like it had been lying there for months. And a day later, in a parking space in a shopping mall near a QFC market: there lay a US Bank credit card. The card looked new and featured a name. I picked it up and gave it to the woman tending the QFC customer information counter and asked her to try to contact its owner, which she happily promised to do. So, there is a silver lining: I could transmute disappointment in myself into empathy for someone else.

And, oddly, when I got home from shopping at QFC, I recalled a class I took decades ago at the University of Washington’s Experimental College. The class was about healthy eating requiring minimal preparation. I remember the teacher’s key phrase: turn your refrigerator into a salad bar. Such great advice—and I’ve stocked my refrigerator that way for years. I was reminded—as I stowed a head of red-leafed lettuce, an organic cucumber, and a quartet of vine-ripened tomatoes into my refrigerator’s crisper—how much I owed that teacher for her pithy prescription for healthy, quickly prepared eating.

Now, conscience: don’t let me procrastinate. Just like you make sure I continue to buy healthy food, insist that I promptly store the extra key when I buy a new padlock.

David

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To the Boy I Should Have Gone to the Dance With

Winter, 2022

Dear Chuckie,

You didn’t know my mother; in fact, you barely knew me aside from classes we shared in 9^th grade at Union High School in New Jersey.

I am writing to you today because of a memory my mom’s grandnephew, Michael has of my mom, who died October 25. In December, my husband and I recorded our extended family members sharing their memories of times with my mom. Her grandnephew remarked that my mom was always questioning the rules and asking why. He felt a lot of freedom in talking with her.

I didn’t think at first that I had ever known my mom like that—she always seemed to me to follow rules, or maybe there were kinds of rules she did and those she didn’t, maybe the ones she did were the ones my father wanted us to adhere to. How many times did she tell my sister and me that she would report our behavior to my father, a traveling pharmaceutical salesman when he came “off the road” for the weekend? How many times had she told us that he would “have a heart attack” if we did one thing or another that he wouldn’t have approved of?

At any rate, although during the recording session, I couldn’t think of a time that I had experienced my mom as her grandnephew had experienced her, a few weeks later, I remembered freshman year in high school when you asked me to the school dance, and I said yes but then Bobbie asked me, and I was torn because I had a crush on Bobbie and had never in a million years thought he would ask me to go to that dance with him. I was so unhappy not to be able to say yes to Bobby.

My mother asked me to tell you both I would go with you together. I snapped at her that she wasn’t helping me out. Her out-of-the-box solution would be impossible. I needed to know if I could change my mind or had to go with you since I had accepted your invitation. I just thought my mother was being impossible, not that she was being open to new rules as a way out of constrictive ideas.

So, I chose Bobby, whose fraternal twin Judy was the most popular girl in our class. Did I think being asked by him would somehow elevate my standing? Unconsciously maybe, I guess. Maybe consciously but certainly denied.

Fifteen years later, at our 15-year high school reunion, you came up to me and the man I had only recently married (Bobby wasn’t even there) and asked why I had turned you down after saying yes to going with you to that long ago dance. At this point, I do not remember what I said. I do remember, though, allowing myself to feel the hurt you must have felt years before because the answer was still important to you to have so many years later. How mortified I was! To be remembered so long as so hurtful.

Maybe in the moment I smiled and said I didn’t remember; maybe I said I was too young (for what? to have integrity?). Is it possible I said I was sorry?

Bobby’s face, by the way, so near mine during the slow dances, smelled of something unromantic, something very dry yet astringent, an acne cream perhaps that he was using. The slow dances were not my favorite that night. And he wasn’t really that much fun, and his sister didn’t pay any attention to me at all.

My mother’s solution might have been a fantasy, but she was, after all, trying to find a creative way out for me.

So, today, though I don’t know where to send this, and though I don’t know your last name without looking for our high school yearbook packed away in our crawl space with boxes of papers we may or may not ever need again, I write to you as if my WIFI connection can bring my apology and my thoughts to you through the ethers. I need to offer you a proper apology. From your question many years ago now, I know you were a sensitive young man and that you remain so. I have a sense that you are fine, that high school hurts and dramas don’t count anymore after almost 60 years.

Romantic indecision followed me for longer in my life than I would like to admit. My mom’s proposal would not likely have been accepted, but offering it would have let me sit for a bit as a 15-year-old who might accept that in romantic matters, she didn’t need to go along with the crowd, and in friendship circles, she didn’t need to date someone to be accepted by others, that accepting your invitation could have opened doors.

Thank you for listening, Chuckie. I am sorry I didn’t go to the dance with you. I think we would have had a good time. I doubt I will make it back to New Jersey for our 56th-year reunion. But thank you for your question at our 15^th. And if you get there, I hope you will smile thinking that even if I had no good answer, you asked the question and that matters.

My best,

Sheila